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NYT's new 'Global Edition' site merges IHT, Times foreign reporting

10:30 AM Mon, Mar 30, 2009 |
By Sheila Lennon    Email this author |   Email this entry

Iht.com is no more. The New York Times Global Edition uses the design of the U.S. home page but folds together reporting from its foreign bureaus and the International Herald Tribune, based in Paris.

Meanwhile, at ValleyWag, Ryan Tate files the execution under "Disasters": Times Nukes Itself On Google:

nytg.jpg

The goal was to fold iht.com into nytimes.com. Fair enough; combining the two sites could have resulted in more juice for the newspaper under Google's PageRank algorithm by combining the strong reputations of the two major newspaper sites.

But the Times executed wrong. Instead of redirecting old iht.com links to the same stories on the new nytimes.com server, it simply redirected all content to the same new landing page. When you click through the landing page, you end up not on the story you were looking for, but on the general global.nytimes.com homepage.

So instead of having 993,000 IHT hits in Google, as the search engine now estimates, the Times will soon have just one. For example, a search on the word "paris" within iht.com brings up 588,000 hits; they all appear to end up on the same general homepage, and thus will be collapsed together by Google.

There's an explanation in yesterday's A Note to Readers in the Times.

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